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MANDIANT RELEASES RAINBOW TABLES ENABLING NTLMV1 ADMIN PASSWORD HACKING

Organizations should immediately disable NTLMv1 and enforce NTLMv2-only authentication.

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THREADS EDGES OUT X IN DAILY MOBILE USERS

Meta's Threads now has more daily mobile users than X. Growth is steady and not linked to recent X controversies. Threads benefits from cross-promotion in Meta apps, a focus on creators, and new features like communities, disappearing posts, and games. X still leads on the web and in the US, but Threads is building a regular mobile audience.

GOAT'S 2026 PREDICTIONS FOR ONLINE CULTURE, CONTENT, AND CREATORS

Creator marketing is now mainstream media. Attention is harder to win as feeds become endless video streams and audiences fragment. Creator revenue is expected to grow 20% and reach $376B globally by 2030. 2026 will see more intentional consumption and a split between AI-safe and AI-friendly spaces. Demand will increase for credible creators, episodic storytelling, and community-led strategies that connect online culture with real-world experiences.

DIARY OF A BRAND: GENTLE MONSTER

Gentle Monster shows that strong brand memory can drive growth without heavy ad spend. Last year, it grew 30% and nearly doubled Luxottica's operating margin using a high-margin direct-to-consumer model focused on memorable experiences. Oversized products, museum-like stores, and unexpected collaborations keep it top of mind. Owned factories and long-term leadership enable $200-$400 price points and expansion into new categories.

GROWTH OVER GOING VIRAL

BÉIS focuses on growth over chasing virality. Partnerships and collaborations with Gap, Chipotle, and Rare Beauty drive engagement, while behind-the-scenes content, especially shot organically, often outperforms polished final posts. Short-form videos can reach millions, but long-form, informative content builds deeper engagement and conversion. The team experiments constantly and often shares stories of the people behind the brand.

AEO FOR CMOS: WHERE SEARCH MIGHT BE GOING IN 2026 (WEBINAR)

Learn how AEO is changing brand discovery. This webinar covers where traditional SEO works, where it falls short, and how CMOs can guide teams without chasing hype. Learn how to prioritize AEO over the next 90 days and understand the risks of ignoring AI-driven discovery. The free event will take place on January 21 at 10 AM PT.

SPEEDY RECRUITING FOR CUSTOMER RESEARCH (WEBINAR)

In this webinar, Elizabeth Creighton, founder of Brazen UX, will discuss ways to find your ideal research participants. She'll also cover the best ways to get participants to commit and show up, as well as simple steps to create an automated participant workflow. The free event will take place on January 22 at 9:30 AM PT.

OPENAI: OUR APPROACH TO ADVERTISING AND EXPANDING ACCESS TO CHATGPT

ChatGPT is expanding access with low-cost subscriptions and limited ads while keeping answers independent and user data private. ChatGPT Go launched in 171 countries and will cost $8/month in the US, offering higher limits, image creation, and memory. Ads will appear for logged-in adults on free and Go tiers. Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans remain ad-free.

GROWTH IS NOW A TRUST PROBLEM

Growth today depends on credibility and customer confidence. Traditional marketing channels are failing as paid search costs rise and AI intercepts organic traffic. Efficiency-based value props are easily outpaced by $20/month AI tools. Employee-led sharing, influencer partnerships, and community-driven growth drive word-of-mouth, which can boost referral revenue.

A NEW STUDY RAISES RISKS OF USING AGREEABLE CHATBOTS

Agreeable chatbots can reinforce beliefs and increase polarization. A study of over 3,000 US participants across four political topics found sycophantic AI heightened extremity and overconfidence compared to neutral or disagreeable AI. Participants saw agreeable chatbots as warmer, more competent, and often unbiased, even when they were not. The research warns that commercial incentives could push AI toward agreeableness, limiting exposure to opposing views as these tools become more common.

YOUTUBE RELAXES MONETIZATION POLICY ON VIDEOS WITH CONTROVERSIAL CONTENT

YouTube will now let more creators earn full ad revenue on videos that discuss sensitive topics as long as the content stays nongraphic.

DO YOU REALLY NEED ALL THAT DATA?

A new Kellogg-MIT algorithm shows that decisions often need only the most relevant data, not more.

2026 LINKEDIN OUTREACH HOLY GRAIL

The founder of Valley breaks down what works and what doesn't for LinkedIn outreach.

OPENAI INVESTS IN SAM ALTMAN'S BRAIN COMPUTER INTERFACE STARTUP MERGE LABS

OpenAI has invested in CEO Sam Altman's brain-computer interface startup, Merge Labs. Merge Labs is dedicated to bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability. It intends to develop entirely new technologies that connect with neurons using molecules instead of electrodes to transmit and receive information using deep-reaching modalities like ultrasound. OpenAI believes that brain-computer interfaces will create a natural, human-centered way for anyone to seamlessly interact with AI.

APPLE IS FIGHTING FOR TSMC CAPACITY AS NVIDIA TAKES CENTER STAGE

TSMC's CEO recently told Apple executives that they would need to acquiesce to the largest price rise in years. Apple once held a dominant position on TSMC's customer list, but it is now fighting for production capacity. Its chip designs are no longer guaranteed a place among TSMC's almost two dozen fabs. TSMC's largest client is now likely Nvidia.

TESLA RELEASES RARE LOOK AT ITS LITHIUM REFINERY, CONFIRMS PRODUCTION START

Tesla's massive lithium refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, has officially started production. The company has released a new video, available in the article, showing off the new site. Tesla's process is acid-free and produces a benign co-product that can be used in concrete mixes. The process is more sustainable than traditional methods and eliminates hazardous byproducts.

NASA'S FIRST MEDICAL EVACUATION FROM SPACE ENDS WITH ON-TARGET SPLASHDOWN

Four astronauts returned to Earth early after one of the crew members encountered an unspecified medical issue last week. They splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego at 08:41 UTC on January 15. Officials have not identified whose health was in question or what was afflicting the ailing crew member. The medical issue did not appear to affect the crew's return to Earth, and they exited the spacecraft appearing in good health and good spirits.

OPEN RESPONSES

Open Responses is an open-source spec for building multi-provider, interoperable LLM interfaces on top of the original OpenAI Responses API. It is multi-provider by default and extensible without fragmentation. Useful for real-world workflows, Open Responses can be used to build agentic systems without rewriting the stack for every model. Examples of projects built with Open Responses are available in the thread.

BEYOND SENIOR: CONSIDER THE STAFF PATH!

The staff engineering job isn't for everyone. It is totally fine to stay at Senior or move into management. It's worth considering a path toward Staff, as it is a fulfilling role. This post takes a look at what it takes to get promoted to Staff and what the role entails.

SOFTWARE'S YOUTUBE MOMENT IS HAPPENING NOW

The barriers to video creation collapsed in the 2000s when everyone got a camera in their pocket and platforms like YouTube changed what could qualify as entertainment. YouTube has now evolved into a media ecosystem where it is as common for entertainment to come from independent creators as from traditional broadcasters. Software is following the same path. AI has massively democratized leverage and productivity for creative people.

TAIWAN WILL INVEST $250 BILLION IN US CHIPMAKING UNDER NEW TRADE DEAL

The US and Taiwan have reached a trade agreement to build chips and chip factories on American soil. Taiwanese chip and technology companies will invest at least $250 billion in production capacity in the US. The Taiwanese government will guarantee $250 billion in credit for these companies. The US will limit tariffs in Taiwan to 15% and commit to zero tariffs on generic pharmaceuticals, their ingredients, aircraft components, and some natural resources.

THE SAAS SELLOFF: AI AND INTEREST RATES

The price of time and labor has changed, and the software stack is getting rebundled.

WHY SENIOR ENGINEERS LET BAD PROJECTS FAIL

You want to be strategic about where you spend your credibility.

USING AI AS A DESIGN ENGINEER

AI can help you get things done faster than ever, and you can experiment with more than ever, but outsourcing your thinking can hurt you in the long run.

MORPHING ICONS WITH CLAUDE

While Claude can build genuinely impressive architectures, it can't tell when something looks wrong.

APPLE'S GOOGLE GEMINI DEAL COULD BE WORTH $5 BILLION

Apple's Gemini deal is comparatively conservative compared to other companies' AI spending.

HOW I'D BUILD A PLATFORM IN 2026

A look at how to build a multi-tenant platform where users have customization, ownership, and the freedom to build out what they want.

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CHINESE AI DEVELOPERS SAY THEY CAN'T BEAT AMERICA WITHOUT BETTER CHIPS

Some elite Chinese AI researchers estimate that the country's chances of catching up to the US are slim in the short run due to a bottleneck in chips. US rules block the direct sale of Nvidia chips to China. Chinese companies can rent Nvidia chips in third countries, but this typically leaves developers with fewer chips and more inconvenience compared with well-funded competitors in the US. The US recently unblocked sales of Nvidia's H200 chip to China, but this is not likely to be a game-changer in helping Chinese companies catch up.

MOBILE APPS ON REPLIT

Replit launched a new AI-powered coding assistant designed to enhance coding efficiency and collaboration. This tool integrates seamlessly into its platform, providing real-time code suggestions and intelligent code completion. It aims to streamline the coding process for developers and teams.

CLAUDE ECONOMIC INDEX REPORT

Anthropic published its January 2026 Economic Index, offering new data on how Claude is used across geographies and sectors. The report introduces five metrics to track Claude's economic footprint and includes the most detailed usage dataset released to date.

NVIDIA'S ACHILLES HEEL: INFERENCE

Benchmark's Eric Vishria shares his email to investors about Nvidia from 2024. Nvidia's dominance holds in training, but GenAI inference is emerging as the weak spot. Purpose-built SRAM architectures from players like Groq and Cerebras deliver order-of-magnitude faster inference than GPUs, unlocking larger models, lower latency, and new use cases. As inference becomes a growing share of spend, performance gaps could shift AI compute winners away from incumbents.

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ON NEURAL SCALING AND THE QUANTA HYPOTHESIS

Humanity started an experiment in scaling up deep neural networks several years ago. The experiment is on track to be the most expensive ever attempted, and we don't yet know what the results of the experiment will be. Despite its importance, there isn't a mature theory backing the experiment. We don't really know how to think about what neural networks are doing internally. The number of people working on such a theory in public is relatively small.

GOOGLE'S TRANSLATEGEMMA

Google's TranslateGemma is a set of open machine translation models built on Gemma 3 and fine-tuned using synthetic and human-translated data, followed by reinforcement learning with quality-focused reward models. These models outperform Gemma 3 baselines across 55 language pairs and retain strong multimodal capabilities.

SEQUENCE DISTILLATION FOR EFFICIENT REASONING

DASD is a distillation pipeline that combines techniques like temperature-scheduled learning and divergence-aware sampling to train compact models for reasoning tasks. Its 4B and 30B variants achieve strong results on coding, math, and science benchmarks.

NVIDIA SPEEDS UP AI REASONING WITH FAST-THINKACT

HOW SCIENTISTS ARE USING CLAUDE CODE?

Anthropic detailed progress on Claude for Life Sciences and its AI for Science program, highlighting Claude's expanding role as a research collaborator. The update showcases Opus 4.5's improvements in scientific reasoning and new use cases across labs accelerating discovery through AI-powered experimentation and analysis.

AI IS EVERYWHERE, BUT NOWHERE IN RECENT PRODUCTIVITY DATA

Forrester's J.P. Gownder argues that AI hasn't yet boosted productivity, similar to how PCs didn't immediately impact productivity metrics. His research suggests AI could replace 6% of jobs by 2030, with many companies yet to see tangible ROI from AI projects. He contrasts AI's slow job-replacement with previous shifts like outsourcing, highlighting financial decisions rather than direct AI replacements driving current job losses.

TWO COFOUNDERS LEAVE THINKING MACHINES LAB TO RETURN TO OPENAI

Thinking Machines' cofounders, Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, along with Sam Schoenholz, are returning to OpenAI.

APPLE IS FIGHTING FOR TSMC CAPACITY AS NVIDIA TAKES CENTER STAGE

Apple faces competition from Nvidia for TSMC's chip production capacity, as Nvidia's demand for AI chips rises with the tech boom.

INVESTING IN MERGE LABS

OpenAI has invested in Merge Labs, a research lab with the long-term mission of bridging biological and artificial intelligence to maximize human ability, agency, and experience.

CME ADDS CARDANO, CHAINLINK, AND STELLAR FUTURES TO DERIVATIVES SUITE

CME Group will list futures (standard and micro contracts) for Cardano, Chainlink, and Stellar starting February 9 to broaden its regulated crypto derivatives offering beyond Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, and Solana. Clients are looking for trusted products to manage price risk, even as overall crypto derivatives volumes cooled into year-end. The move also ties into CME's longer-term push toward “always-on” continuous trading for round-the-clock global markets.

GENERIC LAUNCHES GUSD: A PRIVATE, YIELD-ROUTING META-STABLECOIN

GUSD is the first natively private stablecoin built on Morpho. It is a meta-stablecoin that aggregates dollar assets like USDC, USDT, and USDS, offers opt-in privacy, is non-custodial, and routes onchain yield back to the distribution layer (applications, networks, and end users) rather than to an issuer. GUSD will have risk and deployment support from Steakhouse Financial. Its early partners include LayerZero, Aragon, Status, and Tempo.

INGENICO PARTNERS WITH WALLETCONNECT PAY

Payment terminal giant Ingenico has integrated WalletConnect Pay to enable crypto payments at physical retail locations through its existing POS infrastructure. The partnership allows merchants using Ingenico terminals to accept stablecoin payments without additional hardware or significant integration work. This marks a significant expansion of crypto payment rails into traditional retail, leveraging Ingenico's global network of 40M+ payment terminals.

CELESTIA VISION 2.0: EVERY MARKET ONCHAIN

Celestia's Vision 2.0 pivots the data availability layer's mission toward enabling high-volume financial markets to operate entirely onchain. The roadmap targets blockspace products capable of supporting trading volumes comparable to traditional exchanges, requiring 10-100x improvements in throughput and latency. Celestia aims to become the settlement layer for a new generation of onchain order books and derivatives markets currently constrained by blockchain performance limitations.